A J&B ad campaign showed up in France a few years ago, and I again saw one of the ads today. The whisky ad features two tag lines. The first, “So British!”, is also how the local press likes to describe Kate Middleton. The second tag line translates to “Born in London, distilled in Scotland.” If Wikipedia is a guide, the second tag line holds rather true, but I always find it rather funny that a “blended Scotch whisky” would brag about its English roots (in London, no less!). I imagine someone focus grouped it rather thoroughly and learned that, for the French, everything north of la Manche is basically London. So take a Scotch whisky, add the Queen’s Guard, and you’ve got a rather confusing ad campaign that makes perfect sense to French stereotypes about their neighbors.

But Britain plays a different role in an ad I saw a few times last year while watching English TV:

Here, the image is exactly the opposite. “You can’t beat local,” explains the Plusnet spokesman, pointing out that even the call center for the broadband provider is based in Yorkshire. Considering the cliché of the call center in India, or somewhere far off where labor is cheap but divorced from some kind of exotic, “imported” otherness, it’s to Plusnet’s virtue that its call center is “down t’road.” And in this age of crisis, it suggests that Plusnet is giving the Yorkshire economy a boost by providing call center jobs it could have easily outsourced to, again, say, India.

For J&B ads in France, it’s the (near) otherness that’s the draw: the appeal is that the whisky is “so British!”, not “as French as the person viewing this ad.” This is all pretty straight forward and typical about ads. Sometimes you want the product next door. Sometimes you need to go on a walkabout to find the exotic product you want.

So what to make of this, an ad I saw on (Irish) TV this weekend:

Cobra is a “splendidly Indian” beer, we’re told. If we don’t believe the voiceover regarding the Indianness of the beer with the Portuguese name, we have the stylised “कोबरा” beside the slogan. Then there’s the ad itself. The decidedly non-nostalgic images, playing up something more on the side of Darjeeling Limited than “Chaiyya Chaiyya” (I’ll wait for you to watch the clip again for the nth time), play up some kind of Indianness much like, I guess, Heaven 17 conjure up Yorkshire. But where Heaven 17 is played for (nostalgic) laughs, the effort here is edgily sincere. Hot, sweaty India is overcome by drinking the refreshing, splendidly Indian Cobra beer.

A beer that, as we’re told in the 26th second of a 30-second spot, is “Brewed in the UK.”

To me, the spot becomes disorienting to the extreme, as, whether it succeeds or not, it’s audaciously trying to do simultaneously what both of the commercials above attempt separately. On the one hand, you have orientalized, exotic India with its inscrutable, fractured scribblings printed on the pint glass. On the other, Terry down the way works the night shift at the Cobra brewery, and whatever it takes to keep honest jobs in Blighty, innit.

Anyway, if one doubts the orientalizing nature of the ad campaign, head on over to cobrabeer.com, rewatch the ad, and “enter our competition to win a splendidly Indian adventure” (train and Wes Anderson film crew not included).

Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa

Jean-Luc Mélenchon Discours de Villeurbanne Eng… par kominaaa

If you only have time for one part of the speech, I recommend the 35 minutes of the second part.

Mélenchon has been getting a bit of attention in the English-language press of late, largely because of his amazingly successful march on the Bastille on the anniversary of the founding of the Paris Commune. This was then buoyed by his overtaking Marine Le Pen in the polls, to now be the infamous “third man” in the election.

The first round of elections is on April 22, and, should no one top 50% (very likely), then the top two performers will square off for the second round, whose polls are on May 6. It’s interesting to read the Guardian coverage, especially since it focusses so much on, for example, his anti-1%er rhetoric, like charging 100% tax on all income over 360,000€.

But the speech presents a far different man. Choosing not to rail on the rich, Mélenchon doesn’t seem like a rabble-rouser, but, rather, as a pedagogue. In comparison to, say, the State of the Union Address, which is nothing but a series of lines with the life polished out of them to cue standing ovations, Mélenchon early on tells the crowd not to cheer too much or make too much noise. There’s not enough time, he explains, to get through what he needs to do.

What he needs to do is not make promises (though he does that, too, in spectacular fashion in the second part). As he says, he has to teach his supporters, make sure they understand why they’re fighting the way they are, so that they can, subsequently, take his message to others and convince them.

It sounds a bit vanguardist, but that does not mean it’s a bad approach. Throughout, he jokes that he is criticized for being too intellectual in speeches. That’s not the case, he responds. Everyone in the audience understands perfectly well what he is saying. It’s only complicated to those, like the mainstream media that he claims ignore him, who can’t manage to listen and learn.

To my ear, at least, this pedagogical position works. It doesn’t sound patronizing. And even when, in a bravura performance of “they want intellectual? I’ll give them intellectual!”, he reads from Les Misérables on the differences between the barbarians of civilization and the civilized barbarians, the words hit home, clear as day.

The approach also suggests a mode of politics based on persuasion—moral and intellectual. He’s not whipping a bunch of stormtroopers overflowing with resentment into a hate-filled tempest. Nor are his words the tepid promises of continued stewardship, drawing support by promising the status quo. He doesn’t say, “Isn’t it crazy that they are doing this?” Instead, he teaches, “They are doing this. Here are the reasons why it is crazy.” He knows that, as a non-mainstream party politician (though not far from it), he needs to persuade. He can’t, like a (US) Republican whispering “Dred Scott” and having his audience understand “abortion,” assume too much about those listening to him. After all, they’ve not heard all this before… that’s why it is exciting!

And what is he teaching? An interesting theory merging social struggle (la lutte) with the rule of law (la loi). The low union membership in France, he explains, is not a problem, since workers do not negotiate their rights on a contractual, but rather on a legislative basis. It’s not the case, then, that one needs a strong union to negotiate with management. Better to have the state intervene and tell management that they can only have, for example, 5% of their staff on temporary contracts. That way, everyone in the working class benefits, not just the union members. The law is stronger than the contract—a profoundly anti-neoliberal formulation, where the law serves to ensure contract.

The state needs to remember its obligations to the class that makes up its largest number and are its fiercest republicans, the workers. This is not very far removed from 99% rhetoric, but it’s a different approach than the tubthumping on marginal tax rates above.

For those who have been confused in the past by why Mélenchon saves particular venom for Marine Le Pen (and it’s a rich, rewarding venom), here he explains it clearly. Le Pen and he, he believes, are fighting for the same votes—those who have been brought to ruin by politics as usual and want the little guy to have a voice for a change, not the boring suits represented by Sarkozy and the socialist candidate, François Hollande. He does not need to convince the apparatchiks of the PS to break ranks and vote for him. Similarly, the UMP voters are also out of his reach. But Le Pen’s voters… the gambit is that, if they see past the flattering sublimated racism of her political program, they’ll see that she will not actually help the working class. Mélenchon makes this point clearly by pointing out Le Pen’s plans regarding curbing abortion and getting women out of the workforce. How will these things help the working class? Mélenchon’s then adds that Le Pen, upon seeing the workers in the streets demanding no change in the retirement age, called them “rioters.” Rioters whom she now needs for electoral viability.

And so he marches on in the speech. To Le Pen’s taunts that he is a “communist,” he responds that if believing what he does makes him a communist, then, so be it, he’s a communist. He’s not afraid of the term or of what people did in another part of the world half a century ago under the name of “communism.”

But is that actually the case? Lutte ouvrière’s presidential candidate, Nathalie Arthaud, stares ahead in her campaign posters, with the text underneath that announces that she’s a communist candidate for president, implying that Mélenchon is hardly that, despite his backing by the PCF. And it would be a mistake to assume that his pedagogical tone merely masks a revolutionary spirit. His proposals sound like aggressive social democracy. His first step to help end the crisis of precarity in France, for example, would be to transform 850,000 temporary government workers into permanent employees. Not quite workers taking over the means of production, is it? (Though he does also argue that if firms are going out of business, the workers should have a right to buy it and become the owners, themselves.) On the other hand, Mélenchon’s coalition, as well as the Lutte ouvrière as well as the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste, as this article from the ICFI-backed World Socialist Web Site points out, will back Hollande in the case of his (likely) plurality in the first round, which would then earn, at least someone like Mélenchon, a nice post is Hollande’s government. No more Thalys to Brussels; Mélenchon will be able to live and work in Paris.

Not that the rallying around Hollande will be a shock. It’s nailed on. But it does force Mélenchon’s rhetoric into a sort of uncomfortable zone bordered by skepticism. He’ll never convince the neoliberal Hollande administration (even with him in it) to pursue his stated legislative agenda, much less start a Sixth Republic. But this is the problem with abandoning the revolution. You get mired in legislative coalition-building and the like.

During the regional elections two years ago, I paid little attention to Mélenchon’s coalition. The Front de gauche seemed like a desperate move by leftist parties left in the lurch with the neoliberal socialists on one side and the revolutionaries on the other side to consolidate and rally around Mélenchon, who founded his own party, the Parti de gauche, after turning his back on 30 years of loyal service as a high-level functionary in the PS, and continues to live a comfortable life on 6,000€ a month as an MEP. Mélenchon’s comments at the start of his speech about being vehemently against a cult of personality seem like a direct response to my skepticism two years ago.

Instead, I paid attention to the Nouveau parti anticapitaliste. The NPA, judging from their posters in my neighborhood, seemed like an energetic and young party, riding the coattails of their own charismatic presidential candidate, the boyish part-time mailman and media darling who gives speeches in a hoodie and sneakers, Olivier Besancenot. Besancenot refused to be his party’s candidate this time around, despite good showings in the previous two elections. Over and over he has repeated that the NPA is not “Besancenot’s party,” but that, rather, it is the “Party of Besancenot, and Poutou (the current candidate), and others.” Yet he remains a huge spokesman. Here, he took to the airwaves today to repeat his party’s current approach to the election: ensure that Sarkozy is tossed aside, but also not support the government of Hollande.

Besancenot fait un appel du pied à Mélenchon par Europe1fr

Besancenot, at the end of the chat, is teased for how Mélenchon has taken the trappings of revolution away from the NPA, and now the NPA is taking them back, and Besancenot’s points are good: Mélenchon’s popularity are raising awareness for the left in general, but it’s unclear if a career politician is the person needed to push it further, especially since the Front de gauche is nowhere near as skeptical of the PS as the NPA is. Hence the NPA’s call for Mélenchon to join them in opposition after the election, rather than sit snugly at Hollande’s side.

In short, it’s hard to describe how I feel about the “phénomène Mélenchon.” The speech above is a good one, and it affected me, but after some time away from it, again the skepticism grew. But wouldn’t a (hypothetical) vote for him be more useful, in terms of moving the proverbial ball forward, than a vote for Poutou? For Artaud? Either way, these questions are probably best saved for May 7. Today, the point was to focus on Mélenchon’s pedagogy, not drift into leftist brawling, like in this mean-spirited tear down of Besancenot provided by the Trotskyists at WSWS (no, Mélenchon was also not spared). I’m not sure I succeeded.

Even if Mélanchon won’t bring the worker’s revolution, he’ll at least bring the Danse ! Danse ! Révolution !

What I would rather discuss here, briefly, is how bizarre I continue to find it that the character is named “Megan” in the first place. In my head, I imagine they named her before deciding she would become a main character complete with her own French-Canadian identity mirroring Paré’s own. I lie to myself in this way since the idea of a French-Canadian born around 1940 named “Megan” is, simply put, really unexpected.

During the 2000s, the French form of “Megan”—”Mégane”—was, in fact, one of the most popular names for newborn girls in Québec. As Louis Duchesne notes, “Megan” became a popular name in the 1970s in the US before fading away in the 1990s. About a generation later, the French form became popular in both France and Québec, though the French popularity cratered once Renault introduced the “Mégane” in 1995. The car is unavailable in Québec, and the popularity of the name continued to climb, reaching heights its American counterpart never enjoyed.

Yet no matter how popular “Mégane” has been in Québec over the past 15 years, it was not on the map as a name in 1940. Hence, I would surmise, its English version, and the name of Don Draper’s new wife, was completely unheard of. Maybe she really is as good an actor as her waitress friends suggest, having invented the whole québécois backstory as part of her long con of Don Draper. (Relax, Mad Men fanatics, I don’t believe in the Megan Draper long con conspiracy.)

I may also mention that the book was written… where the libraries are not well equipped for European studies… Hence it is possible and even probable that I overlooked things which I ought to have considered and that I occasionally assert something which modern research has disproved or modified… On the other hand it is quite possible that the book owes its existence to just this lack of a rich and specialized library. If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might never have reached the point of writing.

(from Mimesis)

Some silver lining?

More on the closure of Library.nu:

• Association of American Publishers press release
• Library Closure of Type .nu (by Alan Toner)
• Library.nu a fermé et c’est une catastrophe (by Yann Leroux)
• Library.nu R.I.P (mourned via Borges by Lawrence Liang)
• Library.nu: Modern era’s “Destruction of the Library of Alexandria” (“My first difficulty was finding anything about it in English” by Sean Johnson Andrews)

— Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel

Escúchela, la ciudad respirando

These men love Paris too much to raze it.

In honor of an article I had run in The Classical, “Paris is Earning,” I watched Paris brûle-t-il ? earlier this week. The 1966 movie, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal, is a bizarre piece of work.¹ Though it’s rather obviously (and unashamedly) a piece of pro-French propaganda—no cheese-eating surrender monkeys, these!—the central role played by the city itself was rather startling, though obviously signalled by both the title and the plot:

The Germans are under orders to burn Paris to the ground. Can the French stop them in time?

Opening at the Wolfsschantze, Paris is first mentioned by Hitler, who brings General von Choltitz before him to tell him that he’s now in charge of Paris and that Paris cannot—will not—be liberated by the Allies. Should it come to that, von Choltitz is under orders to burn Paris to the ground. Von Choltitz agrees, and we cut immediately to the title sequence beginning with a shot of the Arc de triomphe.

When von Choltitz later refers back to his interaction when discussing the dire situation in Paris with the bonvivant Swedish consul Raoul Nordling (played by Orson Welles), he points out that he could tell that Hitler had gone mad judging from the fact that Hitler insisted that the city be razed, even if it did not help the war effort.  No matter what, the city is to be destroyed.

Yet, on the other hand, there’s a similar mania on the part of von Choltitz and Nordling. Von Choltitz stalls as long as he can before ordering explosives put in every bridge and in several landmarks around the city.² Nordling talks to him earlier in the movie and explains that if von Choltitz calls in an airstrike against the Préfecture de Police that the French have occupied on Île de la Cité, and if one of the bombs misses its target, which it will, Notre Dame will be destroyed. Von Choltitz is almost at the point of tears, frustratedly shouting that he must obey the orders he was given by the Führer.

Once the general agrees to the cease-fire, Nordling lights him a cigarette. “History will be grateful to you,” he says, blowing out the match, “for having saved a… very beautiful city.”

What these three men are doing, and what the movie does throughout, is treat Paris as some kind of ontological entity that can be conceived of as a single thing with which one has a relationship of some sort. Paris isn’t buildings, it’s not people, it’s not the 48 (or whatever) bridges that von Choltitz has set to blow up. That is, it is obviously all those things, but it is also some network of unknown internal relations between these constituitive objects that then turns it into its own object. And the men are absolutely not self-conscious or metaphorical about how they interact with this object called Paris.

“He’s already got a date, but I don’t!”

The above epigraphs come from a more poetic tradition, perhaps, than dialogue in movies. But the point here is that these men in the movie are not speaking metaphorically. To them Paris exists as a thing to save, to defend, or to raze. Welles plays Nordling as a sort of man just on the verge (maybe I’m being kind) of a gluttonous piglet suckling at the Parisian teat. He’s either talking about food (when he is petitioned to help a woman free her political prisoner husband from jail, he does so largely since he remembers fondly the trout mousse he ate with them once) or he’s eating, like when he greedily eyes the various tortes on von Choltitz’s table and starts helping himself to them, while hearing von Choltitz’s confession of insubordination in the name of saving Paris. But the way it plays out is that he lives and dies for what Paris has offered him and his waistband during his posting. The man loves Paris.

Even more notable is Sergeant Warren’s reaction. Played by Anthony Perkins, the young American is completely stunned that he will have a chance to see Paris. He asks his companion about the geography of the city, eager to make sure he knows on which side of the Seine the Eiffel Tower is.

Though he foreshadows his own death by coining the aphorism “See Paris and die,” while he rolls into the city, a woman hops into his lap and says she has been waiting four years for him to come to her. He replies that the US has only been in the war for three. They kiss, but he’s suddenly distracted. His buddy pulls the woman away, guessing why Warren’s face is frozen. He sees the Eiffel Tower.

The four years the woman has been waiting cannot compare with his earlier “I never thought in a thousand years that I’d get to see Paris!”

This is not anthropomorphizing. Paris is not a substitute for the woman in a simplistic, humanist way, in which his relationship is somehow pathological and wrong. Sergeant Warren is simply moving through and object-oriented ontology, and it’s the object of Paris that affects him most profoundly. And when the camera cuts to give us Warren’s view, we are also invited to be affected by Paris via the synecdoche of the Eiffel Tower. And it works. The movie caused an affect in me for the object of Paris that I did not expect.

Paris, possibly more than most cities, lends itself to an easy and clean objectification like this, to being considered as an ontological entity capable of competing with, say, a woman for a man’s attention, or of being so despicable to deserve destruction at any cost. If “Paris movie” isn’t a genre, it certainly could be.³ And it’s a genre that reproduces itself in the fantasies of nearly every American (and probably far beyond Americans…) who comes here as a tourist.

But for the tourist, Paris is a set of practices, either experienced or performed, along with some kind of local interaction with constitutive objects within Paris. What I mean is that Paris becomes “going to the Louvre” or “having a coffee at a bistro” or “complaining about the smell” or “buying a croissant at CDG as a souvenir.” In Paris brûle-t-il ? it’s precisely the point that it’s not a set of practices or constitutive objects that require saving, love, destruction, or protection. Nowhere is the call for Paris to be saved made in terms of “protecting the Parisian way of life.”

It’s just Paris. No more, no less.

1. The DVD I had gave me the choice of audio in French or English. But it looks like the movie was filmed with original audio both in English and in French (and in German). So if I have English audio, I can hear Kirk Douglas and Orson Welles with their normal voices, but the French have dubbed voices. Or the opposite happens. Gert Fröbe, who plays one of the most central characters in the movie, is certainly dubbed by someone else into French. It sounds like it’s his voice in the English version (Fröbe is better known to American audiences as Auric Goldfinger), but even that seems dubbed. Considering the opening scene is all in German in the French version, and in English except for the scene with Hitler in the English version, which is, for some reason, kept in German, things are confusing. Weird, but, well, whatever. The Sixties.
2. The movie in general, but this scene in particular, makes for some fun rounds of “spot the landmark!” “There’s the Hémicycle!” Etc. When I saw the lion at Denfert-Rochereau, I was confused, until I figured the Catacombs would soon make an appearance. And they did.
3. I lied earlier. Part of why I watched this movie was also since had plans broken to see Charade, which is my favorite Paris movie (so far), at the Le Desperado theater on Tuesday night. This was a consolation of sorts.

Branson ain’t gonna fight no war for you.

Given that class rules everything around me, I knew that Downton Abbey would be like a drug, and I watched the first series last spring in one sitting. While upstairs/downstairs plots always fascinate me for obvious reasons, Downton Abbey had the added appeal of presenting us a family in decline as aristocratic privilege gives way to a new, uncertain (but we know: capitalist) form of privilege.

[In what follows, the assumption is that the reader has seen the first series. Though I spoil a bit of the second series (there is a war; it affects the house), it’s only to make general points completely predictable from the first series.]

Of the more exciting ways in which the show demonstrates the slipping grip of the aristocracy is in the cross-class/cross-nation relationship (or lack thereof, because of its cross-class component) between Lady Sybil and Tom Branson, the Irish chauffeur who proudly proclaims in the first series that not only is he a socialist, but he has plans that go beyond driving around the young ladies of the house. He reads from the Granthams’ library and is a good match for the increasingly restless Sybil, who fancies herself a political activist in the closing episodes of the first series.

Given Branson’s character, then, it’s obvious that he would be very, very much against the war that has been the focus of the first three episodes of the second series (currently airing in the UK). He wryly remarks early on to someone that he is already in uniform, conflating national service with the industry of Service—the industry within which half of the cast works—and he does not share his coworkers’ eagerness to enlist or sad regret over the inability to serve.

Being against the Great War, it is important to remember, was a valid and not uncommon position, especially on the political left of the time. The objections, though, were not about war as such; it wasn’t just pacifists against it. The war was considered a capitalist war, a war fought to enrich J. P. Morgan, a war that cynically appealed to the workers’ nationalist feeling in order to make them go to war against their fellow workers. The Second International, of course, collapsed because of the inability to keep the socialists united around the revolutionary goals of overthrowing capitalism. As the socialists at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915 proclaimed:

Irrespective of the truth as to the direct responsibility for the outbreak of the war, one thing is certain. The war which has produced this chaos is the outcome of imperialism, of the attempt on the part of the capitalist classes of each nation, to foster their greed for profit by the exploitation of human labor and of the natural treasures of the entire globe.

So the question of Branson’s position regarding the war is paved for him by this tradition of proletarian objection to the belligerence and exploitation by the capitalist imperialists.

But what do we get in Downton Abbey? The third episode, which covers July 1917, makes Branson out as some kind of naif. Excited about the July Days in Russia, Branson is apprehensive about Kerensky and calls for Lenin to assert more power. He demands a people’s revolution. But his coworkers are, naturally, worried for the Romanovs, who are imprisoned in the Alexander Palace. Anna suggests they will all be shot, to serve as an example. Branson then ironically responds, “Give them some credit. This is a new dawn, a new age of government. No one wants to start it with the murder of a bunch of young girls.”¹

Later in the episode, during a conversation about the war with Branson, Sybil, trying to understand his feelings, exclaims, “Why do you have to be angry all the time? I know we were not at our best in Ireland—” Branson takes the bait and admonishes her for considering his cousin’s being shot in the street by an English officer for possibly looking like a rebel as being “not at our best.” Now, suddenly, Branson’s protest of the war is no longer about keeping the working classes united against a capitalist imperialist war, but, rather, as an opportunity to settle scores from the Easter Rising.²

The considerate and optimistic socialist, over the course of not even ten minutes of screen time, becomes, first, a naive idealist in the face of the audience’s implicit anti-communism, and, second, a confused nationalist, no different from his English coworkers who eagerly enlist to support their own homeland. He is against the war because it is the English fighting it, not because it is a war fought by exploited workers for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The distinction is subtle, but important, and Downton Abbey blew it. Considering the end of the episode, it will be interesting to see how Branson gets rehabilitated into a position of sufficient servility to continue on at the house.

I hardly expect a fun costume drama that revolves around an inheritance plot to get leftist politics even close to right. The nature of an inheritance plot, in which uncovered birthright or marriage solve the conflict, means that there will be satellite love plots and family intrigues throughout, so it is no surprise that we get them in abundance. Branson, then, is brought in more as a love interest for Sybil. She admires his verve and his political commitment, though she’s, at the absolute best, a liberal. It would be interesting (although cliché) to see her become a revolutionary, but if the story is willing to sell Branson short, to present him as a confused dreamer, then I doubt they will bother to make Sybil a sympathetic (or credible) revolutionary.

Still, again, it is an opportunity missed. Most of my knowledge of the anti-war sentiment comes out of my own wheelhouse: contemporary US fiction as well as historical fiction from the 1930s that discusses the war. Dos Passos’s U.S.A. only gives glancing shots at the war in 1919: the cynicism and resentment bubbles up in the profiles, but not in the narrative, which is primarily made up of men and women in service. On the other hand, we do get the narrative of Ben Compton, who is arrested for his anti-war activities. So perhaps I’m expecting too much from show: maybe the anti-war element that existed in the US (and France and Germany) was not as apparent in England, making Branson out to be an outlier.

1. The youngest grand duchess to be executed, Anastasia, was 17. I’m not sure that counts as “young girl.”
2. The Rising was, coincidentally, a plot point in this Sunday’s Boardwalk Empire, as well.

Google Scholar search. (click to enlarge)

Now if I search for the article on Google Scholar, using the search term “‘Under the Black Flag’ Mosby,” the top hit is to the article in question, appearing in Military Law Review in 1994. And if you click on the link, it takes you to HeinOnline, a web journal gatekeeper with which I was previously unfamiliar. It asked $30 for the privilege of browsing the site for the day.

So I did what I normally do in this case: try again, this time through my university’s proxy. Nothing changed, and the article remained elusive. But when I tried my Plan B, which is looking up the journal through the university’s library catalogue to see where they consider the electronic archive of the journal to be, I was forwarded to the Library of Congress, which offered not only the issue in question but an entire back catalog of Military Law Review for free, for everyone. No proxies, no nothing.

What gives? Google Scholar only links to the pay version of an article that is free from the US government?

Ah, but then look: there’s that link to “all 4 versions” of the article in the Google Scholar database. These versions include the HeinOnline one already mentioned, a citation of some sort, and two links that take you to LexisNexis, another for-pay gatekeeper. There is no link on Google Scholar for the free version of the article.² At least not that I can see. And if you search just on “military law review,” the first free pdf–offered by the military, not the LoC–comes only on the third page of hits. You have to click to the fifth page before the loc.gov pdfs start showing up in the Google Scholar search results.

I know publishers are pleading poverty left and right, but something about this situation stinks and stinks badly. If there’s a gateway to the free version of this article via HeinOnline, I was certainly unable to find it. The same is true via LexisNexis.

So fair warning: always, always, always exercise a little legwork before considering parting with $30 for an article whose value is uncertain from reading just the first page. And Google Scholar is certainly not providing the most useful results.

(I guess part of the issue here could be that the Military Law Review at the LoC does not seem to be indexed by articles, just by issues. Perhaps that is why the Google robots do not find them. Still, boo to paying for free things!)

1. Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I don’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls or consider it particularly good, I could probably write a book about how crazy it is in important and interesting ways without repeating any of the work in Blowing the Bridge.
2. A regular Google search yields the free version at the bottom of the first page of hits, after the links to HeinOnline and LexisNexis.

At my university, a vice president has been arguing that there is no place for a GIS (geographic information systems) curriculum because now everybody can get that kind of data and everyone can make maps.

…

What is your sense of it? Is GIS really dead as a discipline? (And have I thus completely missed what’s going on?) What arguments would you put forward? What are the arguments stronger than the ones I have suggested above?

Thinking that GIS has no place in a curriculum anymore because of the proliferation of GPS devices and (let’s say) Google Maps strikes me as a rather ill-informed position to take, considering practitioners of GIS have not even figured out what it is (or what the “S” in it stands for). How can a moment be over before it is even a moment?

During the past two decades, geography journals have repeatedly flared up with arguments over whether GIS is a tool or a science (thereby becoming a (sub-)discipline), whether use of GIS automatically aligns the practitioner with the military/corporatist history of GIS, and whether such a thing as a qualitative GIS can possibly exist, thereby ”freeing” GIS from its allegedly quantitative and positivist roots. Recent articles by Marianna Pavlovskaya give general histories (and useful bibliographies) of the debates, from John Pickles’s broadsides in the late 90s to Mei-Po Kwan’s feminist rehabilitation of GIS in the last decade.

Furthermore, collected volumes published in the past few years, like Hillier and Knowles’s Placing History, published by ESRI (the publishers of the ArcGIS software package), and Cope and Elwood’s Qualitative GIS (usefully and succinctly reviewed by Daniel Lewis), published by Sage, give accounts of several GIS projects that could simply not be accomplished without GIS (as well as geography!) training that goes beyond hours of asking the internet for driving directions or geotagging photos.

What the vice-president seems to have in mind is what many have called ”Neogeography,” the sort of DIY punk geography that could be the equivalent of the cheap handheld movie camera or portable four-track recorder. But film schools did not close because of the cheap handheld (this seems a useful comparison to me), nor did, and this is vitally important, film studies departments or the companies that make large, pro cameras.

That is, neogeography is a new approach to the creation/collection of geographical data, but the old forms (census tract tables, for example) have not lost their importance at all–nor have they become, I suspect, more intuitive. Similarly, assuming that GIS is “only” making maps on Google Earth would probably be considered an insult by even the people whose chapters were rejected in the volumes mentioned above.

Additionally, for historians, the ease of creating maps of today’s world means virtually nothing when what one cares about is the world from over a century ago–a massively labor-intensive project documented, for example, by Anne Kelly Knowles in her effort to imagine, using GIS software, what General Lee was able to see from his post at Gettysburg. The data she used was not available to ”everybody.” She had to create the data by hand from historical topographical maps. That also means she had to know–have been trained–how to create that data.

Finally, I can give my own personal experience, which was that of a year-long course in GIS, for which a course in statistics (not ownership of a Tomtom) was a prerequisite. Outside of a short unit on using GPS devices to make a small map of campus, nothing we did in those 30 weeks fits the description of Neogeography given on Wikipedia (or is recognizable in the VP’s concern). An iPhone won’t teach spatial analysis, how to measure clustering, what a nearest neighbor is (and why that is or is not important), how to correlate income data from the federal census with crime or transportation data provided by the city, or how to answer even a basic personal (non-academic) question, like, ”where should I live if I want to live within 200m of the subway, within 20km of work, in a neighborhood with an average per capita income of at least $20k, and with < 20 property crimes in the past month?”

Hopefully this email has given some arguments (and suggestions for further reading) about how GIS (or geography) can’t be simply brushed off because of the ease with which one can make “mashups” on the internet.

The review ran in New Masses in April 1930, and though I'm not sure if it's out of copyright, the New Masses were a bunch of commies who should be happy someone is still reading their prose 80 years hence. Also, the “review by a buddy" should maybe come back as a genre. The mincing "full disclosure" we get these days gestures towards a bullshit objectivity no one actually believes. That all said…]

Two or three years ago I stood on a street corner in New York for half an hour, arguing with John Dos Passos about the form of the novel. It was the right sort of place, the sort he likes, with plenty of rattle of machinery, honk of automobile horns, and other evidences of mass activity. I was trying to make an impression on him. What I said was, in brief this:

‘I have just been reading Manhattan Transfer. You have put into it the material for several great novels, and also the talent, insight, and knowledge of our times. But for me you spoiled it by that kaleidoscope form you put it into; giving me little glimpses of one character after another—and so many characters, and switching them back and forth, so fast, that I lost track of the stories, and half the time couldn’t be sure which was which. It is my belief that if you would put into a plain, straightaway narrative the passion and humor that is lost in Manhattan Transfer, you would have a great novel.’

I didn’t know if I produced any impression; so I looked into The 42nd Parallel with no little curiosity. What I found this time is a sort of compromise between the two forms. The jazz effects are still here, but we get larger chunks of story, and so we don’t lose track of them. What we have really is five novelettes, tied together with frail and slender threads. In between the chapters is a lot of vaudeville material, some of it funny, and some of it interesting, and some of it just plain puzzling to my old-fashioned mentality. Let us dispose of this vaudeville material first.

Some of the sections are called ‘Newsreel,’ and consist of a jumble of newspaper headlines. All newspaper headlines are absurd, as soon as they become a year or two old. They are like our fashions: revealing a stupid and vicious people trying to appear magnificent and important to themselves. We are willing to see them ridiculed, just so soon as they are out of date—that is, when they no longer touch our present delusions. Anyone may laugh at ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt and at Harding; but of course he mustn’t laugh at the great engineer who is curing unemployment by blowing blasts of false statistics.

Another set of interpolations tells us about some of the leaders of that time: Debs, Bryan, Burbank, Lafollette, Bill Haywood, etc. These are interesting enough, and as they are short, we don’t mind them especially. But I cannot say the same about the third variety called ‘The Camera Eye.’ These are queer glimpses of almost anything, having nothing to do with the story or stories, and told as if they were fragments from an author’s notebook, or perhaps from his dreams. Maybe they are what happened to Dos Passos himself as he grew up through this period of his novel. Maybe he will tell me some day. He hasn’t told in this book.

Now for the five main stories. First, Mac, a working-boy who turns Wobbly, and gets into the Mexican revolution. Second, Janey, a girl whose home life is unhappy, and who becomes a stenographer. Third, J.Ward Moorehouse, a lad who is bound to rise in the world, and becomes a ‘public relations counsel,’ one of these magnificent, ‘Poison Ivy’ Lee creatures who for a hundred thousand dollars or two will cause the American public to believe that glycerine mixed with toilet perfume will cure pyorrhea, or that high wages are bad for public morality. Fourth, Eleanor Stoddard, a young lady seeking culture, who learns to decorate homes for the rich. And fifth, Charley, another working-boy, who goes to the war.

The ties which bind these five into the narrative are of the very thinnest. Mac sees and hears about Moorehouse while the latter is doing his stuff on behalf of the American oil crowd in Mexico. Janey is there as Moorehouse’s stenographer. Eleanor does some decorating for Moorehouse, and becomes his high-minded friend. As for Charley, who comes in at the very end, all he does is to hear about Moorehouse. One can imagine Dos Passos saying to himself: ‘Go to, I am sick of these closely knit novels, which are full of coincidences and improbabilities, and with everything obviously contrived. I am going to write a novel that is like life itself, in which most of the boys whom Moorehouse helped send to war don’t ever do any more than just hear him mentioned.’

All right, Dos, that is according to reality. But then, I point out to you that it is also according to reality that the great J.Ward Moorehouse knows a whole lot of people, and why couldn’t we have had these in the novel, just as well as those who didn’t know him? The point of my kick is not any delusion about the ancient ‘unities’ of a work of art, but merely the fundamental fact of human psychology, that when we have got interested in a person we want to know more about him; and if, after you have got our interest all worked up, you just shunt us off to some other character, we are not clear in our minds why you should have introduced us to either one. J.Ward Moorehouse is, I venture to assert, one of the most convincing characters in modern fiction, a real creation, simply gorgeous; and I am grumbling because, instead of telling me all I want to know about him, you switch me off to Charley, who is all right too, only less so, and who comes in at the very end, when there isn’t room to tell me much about him.

If Dos Passos won’t take my word, maybe he will take the example of Theodore Dreiser. When it comes to writing, Dos can make circles around Dreiser—who is, I firmly believe, the very worst great writer in the world. Also Dos has a clearer mind, he knows the revolutionary movement, which puts him a whole generation ahead of Dreiser’s old-fashioned muddlement and despair. Furthermore, Dos has an impish humor, a quite heavenly impishness, if you know what I mean. All these gifts ought to make him our greatest novelist, and the one reason they don’t is that he is so afraid of being naive that he can’t bring himself to sit down and tell us a plain straight story, that we can follow without having to stand on our heads now and then, or else turn the page upside down. Dreiser is not afraid to be naive; he is willing to take a common ordinary bell-hop, and tell us about him to the extent of some four hundred thousand words—miserably written words, many of them—and yet, at the end he gets hold of us so that he was able to make a best seller out of a story that ends with the electric chair.

While I am registering my kicks, I want to beg Dos Passos to use a dictionary. His book is full of the sort of errors which publishers and printers’ readers usually take care of. Molasses gets an extra ‘l’ while Lafollette loses one. Such common names as Bismarck, Folkestone and Dick Whittington each lose a letter. Bill Haywood is Heywood four times and Haywood only twice. Sometimes there are errors which may be jokes, who can say? On page 79 ‘Mac dosed off to sleep,’ and on the same page ‘a dog barked at him and worried his angles.’ That is the sort of thing with which James Joyce is amusing himself in his new effusion—only you have to know twenty or thirty languages, and all history, ancient and modern, to appreciate the Joyce puns—and I am never going to.

Also, I want to know, just as a matter of curiosity, why the punctuation mark known as the hyphen should be considered counter-revolutionary. I noted one or two in the book, but I think they got in by accident. Dos Passos runs his compound words together, and when first our eye lights on them, we may not sort out the syllables correctly; I didn’t, and got some funny effects—such as ‘riverbed’ and ‘gass-tove’ and ‘teaser-vice’ and ‘co- algas’ and ‘musicle-ssons.’

Enough with fault finding. I want Dos Passos to be the great American novelist, as he is entitled to be. I want him to ‘become as a little child’ again, and tell us a good, straight, bedtime story, to keep us awake all night. The reason I take the trouble to write this discourse, is because, in spite of all the handicaps he takes upon himself, he has written the most interesting novel I have read in many a long day. I happened recently to read the last volume of Paul Elmer More, in which that very august academic gentleman, leader of the so-called ‘Humanist’ movement, condescends to refer to Manhattan Transfer as ‘an explosion in a sewer.’ Well, there is a little of the sewer in this new book also but not proportionately as much as there is in America and the lives of its people. I will conclude my review of The 42nd Parallel by the prophesy that they will be teaching this book in high schools in future years, when the teacher will have to go to some old encyclopedia to look up Paul Elmer More and the ‘humanists,’ in order to find out when they lived and what they taught.

There’s a 25% chance this is true.

I write this shameful post as someone who has taken more than a week’s worth of statistics classes (and gotten ok grades). And after I spent all night last night trying to figure out a way to have the answer below make sense, I figure it makes sense to try to put the answer online.

Twice in the past two months I’ve been faced with the same question, and both times the answer completely mystified me. “If a woman has two children, and one is a boy, what are the odds that she has two boys?” Until about 5:30 am, I would’ve answered “1-2,” despite having read, for example, here, that the correct answer is “1-3.” Now, again, I’m not an idiot. I understand that if a woman has two children, there is a 25% chance that both are sons, a 50% chance that exactly one is a son, and a 75% chance that at least one is a son. So I could not figure out what was different about the question as posed that yielded a response that was not 50%.

In one of the articles I read, the author explained that the answer is not 50% since we don’t know “the birth order.” This struck me as completely ridiculous and arbitrary. If we know one child is a son, there is a 50% chance the other is a son, no matter what order they were born in! Birth order is as arbitrary as saying “the kid she likes and the kid she hates” or “the kid in red and the kid in blue.” We have two tests, x₁ and x₂ (or x_likes and x_hates or x_red and x_blue), and we know that x₁ = B. Since x₂ is independent from x₁, there is a 50% that it’s also B. QED.

My conceptual mistake is already obvious in the previous paragraph. I figured this out by imagining a series of hundreds of flips of the same coin, but I’ll cut to the chase by rephrasing the initial question in terms of flipping two different coins at once:

A person flips two French coins, a ,50€ coin and a ,20€ coin, and shouts “Marianne” if he sees at least one Marianne. If he shouts “Marianne,” what are the chances that both coins have Mariannes showing?

There are three possibilities here:

1. Person flips a “50” and a ,20€ Marianne, shouts “Marianne!”
2. Person flips a ,50€ Marianne and a “20,” shouts “Marianne!”
3. Person flips a ,50€ Marianne and a ,20€ Marianne, shouts “Marianne!”

So now we have three equal possibilities (the fourth, a “50″ and a “20,” results in no shout of “Marianne,” so we don’t care about it), but only one possibility of the three yields two Mariannes. Hence, 1-3.

What’s going on here is that when I’m told “a woman has two children, one of whom is a boy,” I don’t know which of x₁ or x₂ is already a boy, so all three possibilities above remain possible–imagine if the person is shouting “boy!” instead of “Marianne!” On the other hand, if I meet a woman with a boy, and she says “I have two children,” I can say “there’s a 50% chance you have two boys,” since there are two kids, x_i’vemet and x_i’venotmet. I already know x_i’vemet is a boy, so…

So the conceptual error was thinking that “at least one of her children is a boy” means that I can set either x₁ or x₂ as B and only worry about the other variable. I can’t, since I don’t have that information.¹ The result is that two very similarly worded questions have different results:

1. A woman has two children. The first is a boy. What are the chances she has all boys? 50%
2. A woman has two children. One is a boy. What are the chances she has all boys? 33%.

QED now, jerks.

1. And if I do choose to set one of the the xs to B, I can only answer questions about the other x, and not about the set as a whole.

[Anti-racism and anti-sexism] currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class.

I bring this up to remark upon the surprise I felt when I noticed that only one other student besides me raised her hand. I was pretty certain that in a class of 30 English lit grad students, there’d be more than two who were children of doctors.

Keeping this in mind, I’ve been intrigued by many of the debates about the gutting of humanities funding either at SUNY Albany or in England, as part of the Lord Browne Report. Martin McQuillan’s piece, which I made my class of French undergrads read, talks about how by turning its back on funding the humanities, the state is leaving the study of such things to just the rich. The humanities are being privatized, he warns.

Even more pithily, on the humanist list, Alexander Hay worries:

I fear the worst case scenario will be the most likely one: Most people will go to university to do a vocational degree in the vain hope this is how they get a job, whilst the Humanities and Social Sciences wither on the vine until they become something only rich, privileged people do.

My reaction to this was… isn’t that already the case?¹ The reason, above, that I was so surprised that I was the only other progeny of a physician in my class(room) was because more or less my entire cohort was similarly class marked. It may be different at universities other than mine, but at my university, it certainly does not seem that our division is handing out degrees to large populations of people coming from bottom quintile households. I mean, it’s not like we sit around talking about ski trips to Gstaad, but it’s also not true that, by (selfishly) going off to graduate school in Humanities, we’re wasting our intellectual capital that could be better served by getting a good job with which to feed our parents and siblings.

I wish I had the Google skills to figure out the median household income of every entering humanities PhD student. If I had to bet, I would even give odds that the median is above the US median. I’d even give better than 1-1 odds that it’s higher than the median of entering freshmen. What’s more, I wonder if the median household income of parents of students finishing their PhDs is even higher. I’m willing to be wrong on this, but I’m not so sure I am. My own experience (at, of course, a private university) informs my confidence. It’s a confidence massaged by years of preppy snobbery, doncha know.

Thomas H. Benton, referenced in my last post, boils down the community of appropriate humanities PhD seekers to four categories. One, those who are getting the degree as a credential to improve their current position at their current job, I’ll not consider here. The other three are those who are independently wealthy, those who have spouses who can support them, and those who are hilariously well-connected enough to get jobs in academia. In other words, Benton, almost two years before the Browne Report, is arguing in favor of what Hay is afraid of becoming the norm. The future hasn’t been canceled, as McQuillan quotes Graham Allen. It’s just already here. And maybe it has been here for a while.

When the pushy undergrad in the Xtra Normal video asserts that “money isn’t important to me,” she’s probably right. She’s probably in the same position I’m in–not a financial burden to anyone while, at the same time, not (financially) burdened by others (or by their expectations). I suspect that it takes a certain kind of preexisting class position to make that leap, to dare to say something like “money isn’t important to me.” After all, no parent with class mobility on the mind brags about how their brilliant child is going to be an anxious graduate student barely making five digits when he or she grows up.

1. I can see that Hay does not mean graduate study here, but I do. I’m not at all attacking Hays here; I’m just registering how the comment struck me.

I don’t have much to add about the above video, which probably every Humanities graduate student (or close family member thereof) has already seen, forwarded, groaned or giggled over, and so on. Over at Zunguzungu, we see how the situation is coded in a few ways at once, most notably as a conflict between realism and idealism, such that we graduate students, being of course brilliant realists (which is why we got into grad school in the first place) see the eager undergrad as a laughable fool. Not as, you know, us.

I have an issue with this reading, and it’s enhanced by looking back at Thomas H. Benton’s Chronicle piece from almost two years ago. Benton critiques exactly the sort of behavior shown by the professor in the above clip, who, despite all her warnings to the undergrad, agrees to write the recommendation anyway. In reminding us that professors are “generally too eager to clone themselves,” Benton shatters the idea that somehow the undergrad is not “us.” After all, regardless of our own fantasies of self-worth, we were all at one point in that same office, asking the same thing. Who is to say that we did not sound as foolish and that the professor, similarly exasperated, agreed to our demands, even if just to get us out the door?

Other than her eagerness to work with Harold Bloom, nothing about the undergrad struck me as different from myself. Nothing. I’ve even uttered, word for word, sentiments from the video like the mighty white “money is not important to me.”

Had I not already grokked the Benton piece two years ago (and come to terms with it), I would’ve probably found the video to be completely demoralizing.

Instead, though, I was also reminded of an earlier Xtra Normal video that was on heavy rotation this summer while I was living with an eager to tease Applephobe who considers every Mac/iPhone user (like me) a contemptible fanboy:

I don’t think it’s at all a stretch to see these conversations as, pretty much, exactly the same, except for the end result: in one, the obstinate one gets what she wants, and in the other, the obstinate one takes its business elsewhere.

The dark brown animal is absolutely unswayable regarding its desire: to own an iPhone 4. But when pressed for reasons why, they’re all either tautologies or immaterial. Even when presented with an HTC Evo that can grant three wishes, including a wish for an iPhone 4, the animal persists in wanting only an iPhone 4. Similarly, our undergraduate is unswayable regarding her desire to go to grad school, but when pressed, her reasons are either not well thought out or redundant. I find it telling that after wanting to be a professor, the next reason she gives for going involves being given a grade on a paper by a professor, thereby fulfilling Benton’s warnings about idealising the structured academic life built of little gold stars the student can always chase as though he or she were playing Super Mario 64.

So the seeming solution is to make sure you know what you want before you apply to grad school. Or know that your goal is probably risky, so have a backup plan in place.

There is a third option, hinted at in the video but more explicitly mentioned in the Zunguzungu piece:

Grad school is the thing itself; you might get a job at the end of it, but if you want to do it because you want to be a professor, you’re setting yourself up. You have to want to be a grad student, and to be aware of what that entails.

Compare this to the student’s desires to see how far she can push her ideas on the theme of death in Hamlet/Emerson. Though she repeats strongly for her desire to be a college professor (“I want to be a college professor” is this video’s “I want an iPhone 4″), I can’t help but imagine, and this may be reading myself into the student, that she sees that sort of career path as not precisely that. There are some careerist elements to the student’s dream: she wants to teach and be an inspiration, but most of the careerist concerns about committees, long hours, and the rest, come, instead, from the professor. In that sense, the undergrad has a “clean” desire of pursuing an intellectual project. Scraping together a living in the meantime is only a means by which she can realize that goal. Is that so wrong? Or so different from why people should be in grad school?

Incidentally, I have a few more ideas about the self-selection in this video as well as in Benton’s piece, but remember, I said I didn’t have much to add, so I’ll save that for a later post.

ArcGIS in action. (click to enlarge)

[A lot of the below is meandering toward what I suspect is a rather obvious conclusion to hardened veterans of the digital humanities. Since I'm not one of those, my own shoes needed to walk the mile. Of what transpires below, what might be new is, quickly, how while there is a call for digital humanists to move past prose to include other forms of analysis (maps, in this specific example), geographers have a different approach to the post-prose moment, one steeped in skepticism over the value of visual representations of data. Are geographers scaredy cats? Or might digital humanists be overexuberant? Or some combination of neither?]

Aside from the “reflexive vs. positivist” opposition in Martyn Jessop‘s talk at the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research and his similar article in Literary and Linguistic Computing (discussed briefly here), the opposition that caught me most off-guard in Jessop’s article was one that was reasserted a few times at Geoinst:

there are fundamental issues concerning the status and function of images in humanities scholarship, this includes the images produced by digital visualization tools. Humanists are used to expressing themselves, and assessing the work of others, through the medium of prose. There is a belief that the visual cannot be as rigorous as the written. It is seen, as, at best, a supplement to the written word and stands in a subordinate position.

Jessop continues to explain how images in “modern educational texts” tend to be merely distractions to break up the flow of the text as opposed to being an integral part of the argument. There are “very few instances where the visual is treated on an equal pedagogical footing with the written.”

This line of reasoning from Jessop’s article continued in his talk, and Anne Kelly Knowles referred to it as well, explaining that history tends to be verbal, whereas geography tends to be visual, setting up the situation in history where the text is privileged over the map, which requires more critical response.

Now it is certainly not the case that the humanities value the textual over the visual as objects of study. I know a few art historians, musicologists, and students of film who would spit milk over their keyboards upon reading an assertion like that online. But it feels true to say that, as a mode of scholarship, the prose work lays claim to the most prestigious form of knowledge creation in academe.

From my reading of the dizzying Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0 at UCLA, I get the sense that this tension is a relatively well-investigated and argued one within the digital humanities.¹ Part of the appeal of DH, it seems, is precisely attacking the primacy of prose as the form good scholarship should take, which is reflected in the value given the curatorial (as opposed to the straight analytical). As the UCLA manifesto asserts,

[W]e are advocating for a neo- or post-print model where print becomes embedded within a multiplicity of media practices and forms of knowledge production… Digital Humanists recognize curation as a central feature of the future of the Humanities disciplines… Curation means making arguments through objects as well as words, images, and sounds… All of which is to say that we consider curation on a par with traditional narrative scholarship.²

What’s interesting here, to me, is the interest of the digital humanities to move toward the visual precisely when geography is having its own crises, especially among critical geographers, regarding the visual. The visual is attached to the “scopic regime,” an “ocularcentrism” derived from Descartes, who posited “an epistemological standpoint of early modernity that subscribed to the notion of a detached, objective observer capable of a ‘god’s eye‘ view of the world.” Barney Warf here is drawing a history of geography’s relationship with “capital accumulation [and] the rise of the nation-state,” a relationship helped by the illusion of the “certainty of visual knowledge.”

As the visual arts came to be dominated by linear perspective, so, too, did geography come to be dominated by the idea of homogenous, infinite, Newtonian space containing interlocked nation-states or other rigidly bounded entities, within the metaphor of the surface. “The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century,” Warf continues, “added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surface in which the distribution of social features is evenly distributed.” This scopic regime continued in geography, more or less, until the critical geographers began to break away from it and the quantitative revolution in the 1970s.³

But it is not the case that the critical geographers are asserting for “more prose” in their work. Instead, they were looking for ways to get out from the empirical burden, which, as Soja remarks, though producing “significant and useful factual knowledge about the objective, real world,” had a “tendency to fixate on materialized surface appearances and directly measurable patterning, creating an illusion of opaqueness that could block deeper understanding of the causal forces underpinning these surface expressions.” These “idealized visions of the world” led to a “luminous search for deep structures of causality as the imagined took precedence over the real.”

Soja himself, one of the fiercest proponents of a larger role of spatial thinking in attempts to understand the world, does not argue for “more maps / less prose” but for merely an approach that treats the spatial as an equal party in the trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality. In fact, it seems that it is the reliance on the visual that gives geography its static and synchronic sense, a rigidity (in comparison to history’s richness and dialecticity) that Michel Foucault suspects is the result of Henri Bergson.⁴

I bring up this brief history of geography since it shows how the emergence of GIS can be seen (and is often seen) as a reaction to the work of the critical geographers. Soja calls it a “defensive disciplinary response.” “Over the past ten years,” he continues, “the positivist and descriptive core of geographical analysis has refortified its centrality, sustained in part by large flows of financial support for the advancement of Geographical Information Systems (GIS).” The apparent intellectual offspring of the quantitative revolution in geography, “today GIS,” as Marianna Pavlovskaya explains in a 2006 article in Environment and Planning A, “sustains an industry worth $6 billion a year… and remains a corporate and state-sponsored technology widely used for profit making and control.” If GIS was not so appealing as a means of state and capital control, it wouldn’t be getting the funding it is today, especially in contrast with critical geography.⁵

GeoDa, now available for Mac and Linux! (click to enlarge)

But Pavlovskaya’s article does not to simply criticize GIS: she explains that the reception of GIS as the latest guise of state-control/positivism is misguided, and that, in fact, GIS is beginning to be used as a qualitative method, that is, one of the methods that has “become an accepted strategy for those advocating nonpositivist knowledge production and aspiring for emancipatory change.” GIS, Pavlovskaya argues, gives the illusion of precision and exactness, which subsequently gives the illusion of quantitative analysis. But putting something in a database doesn’t guarantee accuracy, just like relying on fieldnotes doesn’t guarantee sloppiness. Furthermore, computers don’t guarantee logic: one can behave illogically with them and logically without them. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches involve interpretive efforts at pattern detecting, at reading textual fields.

Next, and on this point I’m not sure I stand with Pavlovskaya, it’s not the case that the math used in GIS analysis is actually complex enough to qualify as “quantitative” or even “statistical.” A lot of it is, at its root, just counting or not notably different from regular human interaction with space. She writes,

In truth, most spatial techniques available in GIS are only marginally ‘quantitative’ despite being very illuminating. Using simple math (such as distance measurements or calculations between raster layers), they require spatial imagination skills (such as buffering or overlay) and logical thinking (such as combining layers in site selection of multicriteria evaluation). As such, these core functions replicate human spatial thinking about places and phenomena that is common to all geographic research. Overall, spatial analysis in GIS today is largely qualitative, visual, and intuitive despite its insistent labeling as a quantitative method.

She further offers that even cutting edge “quantitative” work in GIS using AI or Bayesian probability is just an “attempt to replicate human reasoning.” In my mere year’s worth of GIS training, we definitely started feeding legitimate statistical beasts, doing spatial regressions and clustering calculations. These don’t replicate human reasoning–in fact, they exist precisely to slow down human reasoning, which is often terrible at detecting randomness, or the lack thereof. Pavlovskaya certainly isn’t asserting that all GIS is qualitative, of course, but I know that, in my work, I felt like I was eating at the kid’s table until I started being able to attach p-values.⁶ This is my own bias, though, that I’ll unpack another day.

Pavlovskaya does approach the leading question of this post head on, however, in terms of visualization–the image over/with the text. Data visualization is what GIS’s core strength seems to be, as GIS can output maps quickly and efficiently, with both quantitative or qualitative data. She points to Mei-Po Kwan’s work on irrational responses to data visualization to argue that it’s “the most telling example of nonquantitative functionality in GIS.” The visualization is, in fact, quite the alluring song that attracts people–myself included–to GIS. If part of our charge, as digital humanists, is to move past prose, to visualize our data, the satisfaction of GIS is really right up our alley. And it’s easy to get striking results: “Visualization is so powerful a technique that often the manipulation of data within GIS does not go beyond querying the data and displaying the results.” Feed in a spreadsheet of census data, dial up a chloropleth, export to .jpg, and move on.

This is a bit flip, but I think it’s important to assert it. Visualization shouldn’t be an end in itself, and engagement with and understanding the tool of visualization deserves the highest priority. Pavlovskaya warns about how maps are tools of control. Maps over-assert their reliability by relying on a metaphor in the mind of the viewer in which space is scientific and exact, so, as a result, maps are true. Here I cue, again, of course, Mark Monmonier, who warns in his epilogue about using a map with the “dual role of both informing and impressing its audience.” After all, “a flashy map… touts its author’s sense of innovation, and cartographic window dressing in a doctoral dissertation… suggests that the work is scholarly or scientific.” With GIS, we have the added authority of having a computer that’s making the map, so the stink of truthiness clings even more formidably to the embedded .jpg.

Warf closes his own article on networks with a bomb detonated in the ocularcentrist modernist’s favorite street-corner café. Vision’s attachment to truth “is essentially a positivist assumption that denies the possibility of other ways of understanding the world.” Mobilizing Richard Rorty, he finishes by declaring that “once we abandon the positivist metaphor of the mirror as the basis of objective knowledge, we are led to the metaphor of the conversation, in which language, positionally, and dialogue are central.” Strangely, to me, this sounds like, in part, a call for less image-based analysis and more dialogue-based thinking, which gets recreated in prose.

I plan on not introducing any more new sources from here on in, so a recap is in order: there is a move to advance past prose-based scholarship in the digital humanities. This means curating various kinds of objects, this means incorporating non-prose forms of analysis (like maps) and data visualizations in general.

Visualization, however, is an approach to data that, along with its current big-budget exponent, GIS, is attached to quantitative analysis, and, hence, to forms of state and corporate control, power relations that move in direct opposition to projects in the digital humanities that are interested in the empowering capability of digital humanistic scholarship. Furthermore, visualization as an end to itself is still wrapped up in questions of power and control that, in my reading of the UCLA Manifesto, remain unaddressed, pushed aside to make room for unrelated emancipatory rhetoric.

On the other hand, GIS itself has not managed to live up to the hype surrounding it as a quantitative tool. In fact, the revolutionaries in the qualitative world can exploit its power for their own purposes.

But is quantitative work necessarily bad? Can’t there be a quant/qual matrix that people like? This is probably a terribly boring discussion that’s been had at every social sciences get together where there are as many bottles of wine as graduate students, but it’s still new to me.

I find it interesting, for example, that the UCLA manifesto separates quantitative and qualitative into historical moments–a sort of political/developmental timeline that Marx might be proud of:

The first wave of digital humanities work was quantitative, mobilizing the search and retrieval powers of the database, automating corpus linguistics, stacking hypercards into critical arrays. The second wave is qualitative, interpretive, experiential, emotive, generative in character. It harnesses digital toolkits in the service of the Humanities’ core methodological strengths: attention to complexity, medium specificity, historical context, analytical depth, critique and interpretation.

Now there’s a lot in this snippet that I think is very, very wrong (or, at least, getting carried away in the rhetoric of the manifesto).⁷ But it does pitch the digital humanities in a similar historical narrative as that of critical geography. Quantitative geography, however, has not disappeared, so we can’t talk of geography in waves as much as in branches. And considering the fantasy of the quantitative promise of GIS (which, pace Pavlovskaya, I still have), being encouraged to incorporate it into my digital humanities work certainly doesn’t seem like a full on, earnest effort to be, also, “qualitative” and “emotive.”

So I end with two messes on the table for starters: the political/control nature of visualization is unaddressed in relation to the pressure/encouragement to visualize and the role of quantitative work in digital humanities seems to earn the feeling of being old-fashioned or compartmentalized within a larger qualitative framework, at least within the framework of the UCLA manifesto.

Conveniently, I’m walking away from these messes, citing a lack of space on this page to continue. But I do have a feeling I’ll be returning to the UCLA manifesto soon enough. The tension over visualization, though, seems like it might be too complex for me right now.

1. I’m new around here, remember.
2. “Narrative scholarship” here, I think, means “prose scholarship,” not scholarship of narratives. But I’m not positive.
3. Soja on the quantitative revolution: “This increasingly technical and mathematized version of geographical description, however, differed only superficially from the neo-Kantian tradition that helped to justify the isolation of geography from history, the social sciences, and Western Marxism.”
4. “Est-ce que ça a commencé avec Bergson ou avant ? L’espace, c’est ce qui était mort, figé, non dialectique. En revanche, le temps, c’était riche, fécond, vivant, dialectique.”
5. For a tour de force of geography in the service of state control, I encourage one to read the opening pages of Gearóid Ó Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics. The short version is that Ireland did not exist until the English crown needed to control it, so they sent in their surveyors to create an Ireland by mapping and dividing up the land.
6. On the other hand, Pavlovskaya mentions that even with the hard core quantitative work, “GIS technology has fulfilled its promise for quantitative analysis only marginally.”
7. These concerns are not appropriately addressed by the backtracking in the sentences that follow the quoted material.

Charlottesville, VA.

Yesterday’s post on the tension between curatorial/service-y intellectual work and straight up analytical work was intentionally kept rather general, both for larger appeal and since I’m trying to figure out my approach to these questions in a way that’s consistent. Today, I’ll be a bit more specific, and this is sort of a warning about that.¹ I want to show how geospatial scholarship can be a sort of ground zero of these kinds of discussions and debates, though, about curating and analysis.²

Whether factually true or not, I got the sense that I was one of the only people at the NEH-sponsored Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA’s Scholar’s Lab who had never used Google Earth as more than a fun little toy.³ I’m still pretty uncomfortable with the interface, I have no idea what the program does, and I really can’t figure out what role it plays in my life. Most succinctly, finding the url for the following link is the most work I have ever done with the Google Earth API.

On the other hand, I was probably in the top quintile among participants in the use of ArcGIS. So how is it that I’m reasonably proficient, by humanities student standards, with ArcGIS, but completely covered in thumbs regarding Google Earth? Curating vs. analyzing. Webmapping vs. mapping (for the argument).

While trying to figure out, during the proposal process, if my approach to literature was crazy or mainstream, I spent a lot of time trying to find similar projects to mine online. Much of the work I found was similar to Google Lit Trips, a persistent whipping boy of mine. Google Lit Trips is a curated repository of data from multiple contributors (so, collaborative) leaning on the Google Earth API, available largely to enhance the experiences of the encoded text for K–12 readers. In other words, it features service- and pedagogy-oriented work that leaves the work of analysis and argument to the reader. There are many projects like this online, and we were even shown many over the course of the Institute, either as in-the-world examples or by the “curators” themselves.⁴

I have no epistemological quarrel with Google Lit Trips (despite the fact that they’re getting darned close to my datasets!) or similar projects, like (the now defunct?!?) Gutenkarte.⁵  At this time, I have not made any use of them, as I prefer (and have the luxury of doing so) to collect my own data and code my own representations of the data. Furthermore, though our initial actions are similar–we make note of where things happen in texts–the scope of the following step is dramatically different. Google Lit Trips compiles that data into a public fly-through that helps readers orient themselves with a text. Gutenkarte scatters place names from a text on a publicly accessible map. I, on the other hand, process the data (in private) to try and make a (public) argument with it. I play the role not only of the service, but also that of the sole reader, who then transforms into analyzer and broadcasts results of analysis to the public of my dissertation committee.

My argument with Google Lit Trips, and why it’s “my whipping boy,” is that I find it limiting as far as general expectations of what geospatial scholarship in the humanities can do.⁶ I don’t want it to be the case that saying “I do geospatial work on novels” will come to be understood as “I wrote my own version of Google Lit Trips.” This is why the tension between curating and analyzing I remarked on yesterday is still not entirely resolved.

To, me, in fact, putting the data out there by itself, as, let’s say, a table of geolocated and page referenced events, is almost irresponsible, since I feel an obligation to make use of my training to provide some kind of analysis. Sure, anyone can read a .kmz displayed on Google Earth, just like anyone can read a novel. But close reading a novel is a skill that, presumably, adds some kind of value that justifies the extra layer of literary scholar to the interpretation of a text. The same is true of a map, which is basically the same thing as a Google Earth fly-through. I have been trained to close read maps, and I think that’s a skill worth sharing.⁷

But it gets even more complex. Not only have I been trained to read maps, but I’ve been trained to make them. And then I’ve been trained to augment the data on them (“geoprocess”) in order to answer questions. Once I introduce other analytical tools (network analysis, geostatistical analysis), not only does the range of possible questions I can ask (and subsequently try to answer) explode, but the answers become much more… precise. I can start talking about “confidence” and “significance.” And then I can generate arguments, which lead to chapters, monographs, etc.

At some point in this chain of events, however, I stopped being interested in webmapping, in providing a service for people to “explore” the data I’ve accumulated. I turned inward, engaging in my own play of buffers, directional distributions, and nearest neighbor calculations to see what I could learn from that play. None of this looks anything like “so you wrote your own version of Google Lit Trips,” which is why I want to encourage a high enough profile for it, so that people don’t underestimate the usefulness of geospatial work in the humanities.

But this, then, explains why I’ve never used the Google Earth API, and it’s why I only found out about Mapnik for the first time last week. Making web-accessible, pretty, interactive maps has never been the focus of my work. In fact, my maps are pointedly offline, ugly, and frozen, which they have to be for when I start processing them.⁸ And even now, I’m not sure I have a great interest in changing my approach. So, at the Institute, I was less interested in the discussions of making webmaps aesthetically appealing than in finding out if there were free ways to recreate the ArcGIS Spatial Statistics toolbox with something like Quantum GIS (signs point to no). It’s also why what I was possibly most excited about at the Institute–as far as “I can use this in my work immediately!” value is concerned–was learning that Open GeoDa had become publicly available.

On the other hand, back when I was planning my dissertation proposal, and back when that project included geocoding the events of a couple dozen novels, I always assumed that, when I was done geocoding, I would make the data available publicly. Maybe not as a interactive webmap, but still. Why not, after all? I can’t claim proprietary control over mere facts that I collected (as we learned during the fair use presentation at the Institute!). The number of novels I’ll geocode (and the depth to which I’m coding them) has greatly shrunk as my project has changed, however, to the point where I stopped thinking about the data I’m collecting as of any public utility.

In other words, I always assumed some sort of service-y aspect to my dissertation work in addition to the analytical; I was already pursuing an argument via curation, via play, via iterative exploration of my own dataset. I just wasn’t calling it that, and once I stopped considering my data to be of interest to the public, I even stopped thinking about it as a potential site of service.

But that tension… that tension remains, since now I’m saying basically that I would leave the data available in my wake. That is, I’ll continue building a monograph, and as a side benefit, anyone with a web browser can see where all the activity in Dos Passos’s U.S.A. occurred. As a result, service becomes the cherry on top, which feels kind of wrong. Or, at least, a copout.

I think I’ll end here, despite the fact that it feels like my argument has more run out of steam than concluded. These pieces I’m writing this week–most everything I’m writing about the Institute–is going to be half-baked, since it’s more a question of relating a response to the events of the Institute to my own interests than presenting finished, tidy thoughts. Oh well.

1. I know, I promised “fieldwork vs. armchairwork,” but that will come later!
2. Ooh! maybe this will be “fieldwork vs. armchairwork”!
3. A variant of this arose during our Twitter argument over cartographical aesthetics. I was forwarded links to Mapnik, which I had never even heard of before. As I’ll show, I’m still not sure how I’ll ever use it, though I’m glad to know about it.
4. I don’t know that the people involved would agree to such a designation, which is why I isolate it in quotes
5. Gutenkarte’s domain has expired. Here’s Metacarta‘s description of it: “Ever read a book, and wondered where the heck it took place? With Gutenkarte, we combine books with maps to show where a story is taking place.”
6. This part is a bit strawmanny, but I think it’s an important discussion to have, and I sort of regret shying away from it at the Institute.
7. A quick example: everyone who has taken a statistics course has probably had some kind of exercise to show that humans are awful at detecting or creating randomness. This is true on the spatial plane, too. Eyes are crappy at separating clusters from random distributions, so that it can often be the case that untrained eyes (non-skeptical eyes) can straight up misread a map. That actually may be easier to do than to misread a novel.
8. I pretty them up a bit when I prepare them for public presentation. And by “frozen” here, I mean in contrast to “flat,” which is a distinction I’ve tackled elsewhere.

The Rotunda again. (click for original)

“It seems kind of absurd to expect a 30 year old to be able to produce a monograph,” one of the attendees of the Institute for Enabling Geospatial Research at UVA said after our dinner in the stunning Dome Room. We were chatting as a group, and the topic moved to how the dissertation as a project has changed over time. Robert Scholes, one person pointed out, catalogued the Cornell Joyce collection to earn his PhD. So no less a luminary than Scholes, whose Textual Power I had to read twice by the end of my second year of undergrad, did not write a monograph for his dissertation.

Then another person at the table mentioned the frustration that emerged over getting little appreciation for the amount of extra-analytical work that went into the dissertation project… databases, webpages, etc. None of it counted, presumably since none of it would go into the monograph.¹

Personally, I had never really considered these issues. I always figured the non-monograph dissertation was a sort of fluky thing that happened after the fact, like how Tractatus became Wittgenstein’s dissertation as a formality. Similarly, I had never expected that extra-monograph-y work, like a database, would (or even should) count toward a PhD. In framing my project in the formal document of the proposal, I knew I would need to build a database. And since the proposal is a contract to do certain amount of work, I knew that building a database would be part of the labor, which can include reading (novels, theory, archival material), writing (the dissertation) and other things, like learning a foreign language or programming language or acquiring some other skill. So if I didn’t want to spend time with a db, I should’ve invented a project that didn’t require one.²

The Scholes example, though, messes my preconceived notions up a bit. And during the course of the Institute, precisely during Todd Presner‘s great presentation on the work he has done with HyperCities, the tension in my preconceived notions was framed in a tidy grudge match: curating vs. analyzing.³

HyperCities calls itself a “collaborative research and educational platform for traveling back in time to explore the historical layers of city spaces in an interactive, hypermedia environment.” Pulling from various online repositories, the HyperCities project creates something like what “The Arcades Project would have looked like if Benjamin had Google Earth,” according to my notes. Layer atop layer of feature-rich historical data spatializes various narratives of the city that is being “hyperized” (my term). I instantly saw in it lots of potential for projects that friends of mine are working on (and duly let them know about it), but it left me cold regarding the very narrow silliness that is the argument of the/my dissertation.

Presner anticipated this response, if I recall correctly, by saying that the HyperCities project is “not an argument, but a curation.” He later added that curation can be its own argument, and I’ll get to that, but I want to spend a bit more time on the coarse opposition on the table. As a curated project, HyperCities allows the visitor to “explore” a city and a history as one object made up of a staggering number of embedded, spatialized narratives, with no real argument to be found.

And there’s a weird word in that description of HyperCities: “visitor.” I can’t imagine a dissertation having a “visitor.” It has, at best, “readers,” and one can usually count those readers on one hand. Further, the monograph dissertation makes an argument. It’s not a curation. Curation is more like Scholes’s dissertation, the kind of dissertation that, to me, at this time, sounds totally inconceivable as a dissertation.

Most of the participants, or so it seemed, at the Institute were faculty, so they were not, obviously, dissertating anymore. But wouldn’t their projects, which were often similarly more aligned along the curatorial side than the arguing (I’m going to use “analyzing” from now on) side, surely have to be eventually converted into the coin of the academic realm, the monograph that posits a thesis and engages in analysis to reach a conclusion? Generating these curatorial projects seem to be great for pedagogy and for “visitors,” but I’m surprised that they get folded into promotion.

In fact, a feature-rich website offered to the public sounds a whole lot like “service,” which, one presenter remarked, doesn’t count for much when it comes to promotion. I certainly think that’s a crummy state of affairs, and I’ve written before that I think that if the humanities wants to get its “we matter” mojo back, a great way to do it is precisely via service-oriented projects, especially those with a collaborative element. But those are wishes, and, as Steve Sanders famously remarked, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

So as I wrote above, I was left cold by the presentation. I analyze, I said to myself. I don’t curate. And I still think that’s true, for what it’s worth, but Presner’s saying that “curation can be its own argument” requires a bit of expansion, since I think it muddies things up for me rather seriously.

If Presner described what he meant by the above, I didn’t jot it down. But to me, it reminds me of the role of the cartographer in making a map. Curation isn’t about collecting every little datapoint about every little thing. That would be a task for Arthur Danto’s “Ideal Chronicler,” and, as Danto shows, the Ideal Chronicler cannot exist. Curators, like cartographers, make choices. They have biases. A curation can’t have everything just like a map can’t show everything. Cue Monmonier’s axiom that not only is it “easy to lie with maps… it’s essential.” The map and the curation both reflect the choices of the person behind the product—and that person’s omissions, agenda, and so on.

But, amazingly, this sort of known incompleteness, even if it cannot be totally grasped, resonated with a second theme from the first day of the Institute, which was the conflict between reflexivity and positivism. Martyn Jessop, who presented on issues facing geospatial research in the humanities (a presentation similar to his article from 2008 in Literary and Linguistic Computing), closes a section of his article by asserting, “Ultimately, the most significant contribution of GIS to humanities scholarship may not be as a positivist tool but as a reflexive one.” In his talk, he repeated this sentiment, and both times I did not understand what he meant by “reflexive.” Seeing GIS as “positivist” is pretty easy (and a possibly wrong… or, at least, conclusion-jumping… move), but I had no idea what the “reflexive” side would look like.

So I asked. Jessop answered that it involved collecting the data and looking at it, thinking about it. Reflecting on it. As I understood it, this meant a strategy of collecting data and not considering the day done once R^2 is calculated. This reflexive move then returned in Presner’s presentation. HyperCities invites the visitor to explore (or, perhaps, better, “play with”) the data, setting up playful situations that generate aleatory encounters that lead to future arguments.⁴ This idea persisted through to the final day, when Bethany Nowviskie presented on “graphesis,” a term I don’t know, but that I’ve described in my notes as a sort of “sketching” or “iterative graphical ideation/expression/inquiry” that generates, through the play of iteration, previously unseen strategies of argument.⁵

So “curation can be its own argument” incorporates reflexivity, play, the aleatory, graphesis. It’s iterative and unpredictable. Exciting. Oh, and it’s service-oriented and open to the public. All this against “analytical,” which is closed, limited, deliberate. A precision strike. Maybe I should reconsider my earlier pride from declaring that “I analyze” instead of “I curate”?

And maybe, then, the dissertation that is only a monograph might begin to seem antiquated, selfish, and, perhaps, even, problematically élitist?

1. These memories are intentionally a bit fuzzy and uncertain, since nothing was on the record, but I don’t think that, if the people involved were to recognize themselves in what I’ve produced here, they would complain. The details aren’t terribly important, but what is important is to show that this discussion stretched beyond just the presentations I describe below.
2. “Waste” would be the currently appropriate verb, as the mess sits as an .mdb, waiting desperately to get converted to a real format with a web interface, but that’s a project for another time.
3. I think that all of my Geoinst-related posts should be presented in this combative style. We had human (language) vs. machine (language), now this, and next will be, um… fieldwork vs. armchairwork? Yeah!
4. I’m not sure it’s fair to suggest, which is what’s implied by setting up this “reflexive” or “play” mode against the “positivist” one, that there isn’t a certain amount of play and experimentation with data in the positivist social sciences, but that’s not a terribly crucial point here.
5. The role of the random in project planning, inspiration, and execution is way outside of my expertise, but it seems like any and all projects involve a certain amount of randomness in the form of contingency: the agents are at a certain place at a certain time, and the like. As such, there is no dissertation in the world that does not have some stage of spaghetti being thrown against a wall that then moves forward from the contingent circumstances surrounding which spaghetti it was that, finally, stuck. The issue here is whether the play gets suffocated—straightened out—in the sclerotizing effort of the PhD candidate to make something Serious that can get the candidate Hired.